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| The importance of a Doon School revolutionary |
| Saturday September 26, 2009 |
| This week a man born in South Mumbai and educated in Doon School and London was arrested for allegedly working as a Maoist in central India for almost two decades. Also this week more than 30 industrial workers died in a place not far from where Maoists hold sway. Imagine 30 people dead and 70 trapped inside a structure in Delhi or Mumbai. Or perhaps, there is little need to imagine; if the unfortunate event was to happen, most likely we would be getting minute by minute live images from the site. No such broadcast luck for the workers who died in a chimney collapse in Korba in Chhattisgarh. Or those who possibly are still struggling to survive. We barely saw their pictures on national TV. News worthiness is often determined by proximity, or conversely, distance from the centre of gravity, and by that logic Korba is too far away. And not just because of it is located 200 kilometres from the nearest airport at Raipur. Distance, as we know, goes beyond just geography. As an internet joke circulating right after the Lok Sabha polls pointed it, many people in South Mumbai did not vote this year since Barack Obama had already won. This is not an extreme example. Bombay can be closer to New York than to Bihar. It all depends on which social and economic universe you occupy. By this reckoning, the workers of Korba stood a chance of making it to the prime time. The duration may have been substantially longer if they had died building a metro used by the middle classes and endorsed by the elite of the capital, but at least they got a minute, I suspect since they died at the site of an upcoming power plant, which qualifies - even if the workers themselves don't - as part of the same connected universe. Double the 200 kilometres, take away the industries and mines, and you land in Dantewada where tribals are not just living but also dying in a completely different and disconnected universe. Kobad Ghandy, the man arrested this week, made it to the headlines, I think, because he brought these two unlikely universes together. It is in the convergence of these two universes where the 'romance' of the naxal movement lies. And it can be summarised in one line: in a country where most urban folks are busy climbing the social ladder, some young men and women gave it all up to work for the exploited rural poor. Kobad, by all accounts, gave up a life of great privilege and comfort to work under very difficult circumstances with his wife Anuradha. The couple surfaced in every single conversation I had two years ago while investigating the shadowy world of urban revolutionaries. The investigation had been prompted by dramatic arrests made by the police in Mumbai when they picked up two men - a former college professor Vernon Gonsalves and an ex student leader Sridhar Srinivasan - allegedly with explosives. The police claimed they were senior Maoist leaders planning to bomb the city. Vernon's wife Susan Abraham denied the charges and countered they were being framed for their activism in the tribal areas of Vidarbha. I travelled to Chandrapur, the town where Vernon and Susan lived, to find little evidence of either. Some lawyers did indeed remember Susan as the firebrand activist who took up cases of poor tribals but Vernon found recall only as the husband who would slip in and out of the town, often with long absences. The IG of the anti naxal unit in Nagpur had an explanation for this pattern. He said someone like Vernon led a double life, surfacing in public as an activist, but working 'underground' as a Maoist. As a public activist, he would engage in propaganda for the naxal movement but while underground he would participate and even lead a dalam in violent attacks. The IG claimed he had evidence of the two men's role in violent incidents. The trickier question I posed to him - what if a person does not actively participate in violent incidents but functions as an ideologue in the movement (as Kobad Ghandy reportedly did)? The IG was quick to point out that being a member of the banned CPI Maoist itself counted as an offence. But the trickiness does not end here. This, in fact, opens up a minefield of debate over the nature of support to the naxal cause. In a shadowy world of double lives, how to draw sharp lines? More so, when the few voices that courageously defend the rights of poor - mill workers, dalits, tribals - often also emerge to defend the arrested 'naxals'? Shoma Sen, a college professor and activist in Nagpur, had moved to backward Vidarbha as part of the same wave of student radicals from Mumbai in the late seventies. She told me she had not made any 'great sacrifice', but some of her friends like Vernon, Sridhar, Anuradha and Kobad did by going 'underground'. "They are out to fight against the state. That is the path they have chosen." Sen was unapologetic about her support to the naxal movement, its aims, even its use of violence. The lawyer defending Vernon and Sridhar, Surendra Gadling, also turned out to be protégé of Anuradha. He was equally defiant. ''I believe in Mao's ideology. If that makes me a Maoist, then yes I am a Maoist." Surely it is impossible to fault someone for their ideological views, but is it not a problem for those who reject the Indian constitution and wage war on the Indian state, to selectively invoke the same constitution and its rights when need be? Shoma Sen's response was a revelation. "What's wrong with that? Because you are rejecting it, it means through a process you would like to overthrow the present system and replace it with a better system. But while you are living in it, you use so many things of the present system." This was the most blasé justification of the use of the civil rights discourse to defend those indulging in violence. And that is where the 'romance' of the naxal movement runs into a dead end. At least for me. You can admire urban revolutionaries for choosing to make a journey that few make in India - from the universe of privilege to the universe of deprivation. But how can you admire them for bringing to their cause both intellect and violence, the former dangerously in the service of the latter. |
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Supriya Sharma is a roving reporter who, in the last six years, has moved base from Mumbai, to Bihar, and recently Delhi. She is now based in Ahmedabad.
